Thanks Jonathan. I'm going to run some tests to see if I can produce the results you mentioned. This is a point of sale database, and queries against this table need to be quick and more importantly, consistent. Thanks again!

On 5/28/08, Jonathan Lewis <jonathan_at_jlcomp.demon.co.uk> wrote:

The effect will be version dependent, and query dependent.
You may get unlucky on queries that cannot identify a single
partition at optimisation time - leading Oracle to estimate a cardinality as the average cardinality implied by having 30
partitions (worst case "real cardinality / 30").

Say I've got a table that's partitioned by day and has 30 days worth of
partitions. Every 30 days I'll create another 30 days worth of partitions
and drop the previous 30 days worth. Stats are running everyday so the
thinking is that having 29 or so days worth of empty partitoins will not
cause any SQL performance issues. Testing has shown this to be the case,
but wanted to see if there's any insight on having many empty partitions.